| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Rick Prelinger |
| 00:00:05 | So the Prelinger archives online
stemmed out of casual conversation |
| 00:00:11 | that I had when I first got on the phone
with Brewster Kahle in 1999 |
| 00:00:16 | and within the first 20 seconds he said:
"Do you want to put your archive online for free?" |
| 00:00:21 | And I started to stutter, I said "I make money |
| 00:00:24 | charging for access to my collection,
how could I give it away, I don't know about this". |
| 00:00:29 | And I was new to California,
I hadn't been inculcated in the values |
| 00:00:35 | of the open source movement
and I knew nothing about free culture. |
| 00:00:37 | But after thinking about it for a while
I realized this was an experiment worth trying because |
| 00:00:45 | I'm a contrarian and I felt that
there were a lot of things wrong about the |
| 00:00:49 | whole archival and stock footage world. |
| 00:00:51 | And in addition we had always given out footage for free
or just for duplication costs |
| 00:00:56 | to worthwhile projects like this one
or social and cultural artistic community projects |
| 00:01:03 | that we wanted to see
- do our little bit to help enable. |
| 00:01:06 | But it was expensive,
because it cost just as much to give something away |
| 00:01:10 | as it does to charge for it, it's still time and all that,
so in a lot of ways |
| 00:01:16 | this seemed like it offered us a way to do the right thing
without experiencing the adverse consequences of doing that |
| 00:01:23 | and beginning at the start of 2001
we started to put material online. |
| 00:01:30 | To the best of our knowledge
we've had over 7 million films downloaded |
| 00:01:34 | Now this may not seem like much
but these are very obscure films, |
| 00:01:39 | the most well known film that we've put up
"is Duck and Cover". |
| 00:01:42 | But there's a lot of stuff that's of interest
just to rail-road buffs and train-spotters, |
| 00:01:47 | or the telephone collectors,
or the people interested in the history of |
| 00:01:52 | Southern California,
the small slices, small interest groups. |
| 00:01:58 | But all in all we think about 7 million films,
our estimate, |
| 00:02:03 | and this is an educated estimate,
is that about 80,000 derivative works |
| 00:02:09 | have been made from the material that we've put up online. |
| 00:02:14 | A lot of people who own content or who control content
or who are gatekeepers to content, |
| 00:02:22 | are freaked out about giving things away and
our experience has been |
| 00:02:26 | to them, very counter intuitive. |
| 00:02:28 | To us quite fulfilling what we found
after we put all this material up online, |
| 00:02:33 | and we put all our good stuff,
the stuff that we knew people wanted, is that our sales went up. |
| 00:02:40 | One of the things that intrigues me tremendously
about the proliferation of material |
| 00:02:44 | that's out there in the world for people to grab
is the potential creation of millions of new authors. |
| 00:02:52 | And the consequent breakdown of
that long lasting barrier between |
| 00:02:57 | consumers and producers that's bandied about
all over the place as participatory media |
| 00:03:02 | My personal experience is that
when you begin to get millions |
| 00:03:07 | of new authors really, really interesting things can happen. |
| 00:03:10 | And from an archivist's point of view,
or a librarian's point of view when you put |
| 00:03:14 | put primary materials in the hands of ordinary citizens
really interesting things can happen. |
| 00:03:21 | History is no longer the province of academics and intellectuals, |
| 00:03:28 | definitions of culture begin to shift
and change in very interesting ways |
| 00:03:33 | and as we know questions of what's high culture
and what's low culture often get inverted |
| 00:03:38 | or scrambled in ways that I think are tremendously productive. |
| 00:03:47 | Larry Lessig talks about the model of scarcity
being supplanted by the model of plenty, |
| 00:03:52 | which is a way of thinking that I like a lot.
When the model of plenty begins to rule, |
| 00:03:59 | as I think it is now, people have a tremendous
amount of information at their disposal. |
| 00:04:04 | Some of it is fact, some of it is not necessarily fact,
but in terms of history, |
| 00:04:10 | which is what i work with, when you put history
in the hands of ordinary people |
| 00:04:17 | you enable them to do what I call historical intervention. |
| 00:04:21 | Our archive is a historical intervention,
this library is a historical intervention. |
| 00:04:27 | It means re-injecting the past, re-injecting the content,
the discourse, the ideas, the text, |
| 00:04:36 | the images of the past, into the present and giving |
| 00:04:39 | us the opportunity to look at the present differently. |
| 00:04:42 | In other words recontextualizing the present through infusion |
| 00:04:47 | of historical material - tremendously exciting. |
| 00:04:50 | It means it gives us the opportunity
to snap ourselves out of this eternalised present |
| 00:04:56 | where we believe that everything is new, everything is fresh, |
| 00:05:00 | we're the first generation to experience what's happening now. |
| 00:05:05 | I actually find it provocative and fascinating,
when I started showing people old educational |
| 00:05:13 | and industrial films back in the 80s I realized
that we all had tremendously sterotypical ideas |
| 00:05:19 | about the 30, 40s, 50s and 60s in American life,
and when I started showing people these films, |
| 00:05:27 | quickly, in conversation, we could move
beyond these simplified formulations like |
| 00:05:32 | 'it was a simpler time',
'people were kinder', 'it was safer', |
| 00:05:36 | 'it was better for kids',
'there was no dissent in the 50s'. |
| 00:05:40 | All these simplified ideas kind of fell away |
| 00:05:43 | and we could see the past and the present in its complexity. |
| 00:05:49 | In general I'm all for abundance
because I think it enables new forms of |
| 00:05:55 | social expression and critique
but I don't think that's inherently true. |
| 00:06:00 | People could always go to libraries
and use what they find in libraries in different ways. |
| 00:06:05 | Its not so much the pre-existence
of a lot of information that changes it, I think it's |
| 00:06:12 | the use that people make of it. |
| 00:06:14 | I think to me the abundance of authors
and the abundance of voices is much more central. |
| 00:06:22 | You know all over the place there's
these amazing stories about people, |
| 00:06:26 | making new work without permission and using the net as |
| 00:06:29 | this amazing distribution system. |
| 00:06:31 | I made this fairly rarified experimental feature film, |
| 00:06:35 | put it online and got into the Rotterdam film festival,
got reviewed in the New York Times. |
| 00:06:40 | I'm fundable now to make more work
in ways that I wasn't before, |
| 00:06:45 | and I'm not even the most...
I'm one of a million examples. |
| 00:06:50 | What interests me is the fact that the world is bifurcated |
| 00:06:55 | between people who believe that they can do that
and know they can and often do it, |
| 00:06:59 | that see it as an opportunity, |
| 00:07:01 | And then the other group who's often older,
more established, |
| 00:07:06 | who's completely threatened by that. |
| 00:07:08 | So the world of documentary film is very interesting. |
| 00:07:10 | Documentary film makers have always been interested
in getting their work presented |
| 00:07:14 | behind the red velvet curtain. |
| 00:07:16 | PBS, Prime Time, HBO, Theatrical, Channel 4 UK. |
| 00:07:24 | There has always been this interest
in the best possible presentation for your film, |
| 00:07:30 | and that system can only absorb a small number of works at anyone time. |
| 00:07:35 | And a lot of people from that group
who have great talent and great abilities |
| 00:07:40 | to do wonderful work don't want to make online work,
for them the web is for lower life forms |
| 00:07:46 | or for people who are just getting established. |
| 00:07:49 | And what I'd be very concerned about
is trying to get these people won over to this much more |
| 00:07:55 | open system - it means they have to compete,
it means they lose privilege, |
| 00:07:59 | they lose that sort of handicap they already have. |
| 00:08:03 | But that to me is a big problem,
that there are people who basically |
| 00:08:08 | don't want to pick up these great tools that are there. |
| 00:08:12 | We need to also move away
from a query driven internet |
| 00:08:17 | where you have a search engine and
you fill the box with something that you think you want, |
| 00:08:23 | you put your intention in the box,
and then something comes back to you. |
| 00:08:27 | We need to be able to surprise people. |
| 00:08:30 | This was great about the early net and the ???C |
| 00:08:34 | and the what's new and the what's cool-buttons,
you'd be surprised. |
| 00:08:39 | So in Google you have the I'm feeling lucky- button
but you don't have the surprise me-button |
| 00:08:46 | Serendipity, discovery surprise - |
| 00:08:49 | very, very powerful functions psychologically
- again, endangered species. |
| 00:08:55 | This library which my partner Megan and I built is about serendipity. |
| 00:09:01 | It has an idiosyncratic taxonomy that Megan designed,
the idea's that you go to |
| 00:09:04 | an area of interest and then you become surprised. |
| 00:09:09 | We don have a catalogue, we're not query based, |
| 00:09:12 | we're not the typical library where the first thing
you see when you walk in the atrium |
| 00:09:16 | is a computer asking you to formulate a query
and then it tells you where to find a book. |
| 00:09:21 | We don't believe in that. |
| 00:09:23 | We believe in letting people look at the books and be surprised so |
| 00:09:29 | a writer recently said about us that we want people
to find what they're not looking for. |
| 00:09:36 | This is getting to be hard to do online bb
because things are all query based. |
| 00:09:41 | You could do wonderful things with databases
especially when they're very, very large |
| 00:09:46 | mass databases but just like science is
science, medicine, education |
| 00:09:54 | and the criminal justice system are trying to breed out the unusual |
| 00:09:58 | and shift us in the direction of a monoculture. |
| 00:10:01 | In a lot of ways this is what a query based interface
do in terms of knowledge. |
| 00:10:08 | How are we going to be surprised?
How are we going to be exposed to new things? |
| 00:10:13 | I think we really need to keep that alive. |
